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Comment by khat | Hacker News Reader

Does this surprise anyone, just over a decade ago there was a whistleblower who said the government was spying on its own citizens. The president and half the country called him a traitor. The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification. That includes working any job that also requires the use of that tech(Basically all jobs). The only thing that talks is money and when half your workforce is not working(or buying anything because they aren't working) then things will get changed real quick. But most people don't want to do that because no one is willing to suffer short term for long term gains. The govt and 1% know this that's why they increment it slowly overtime with generic causes like "save the children"

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> The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification

No, the way to stop it is to talk to your representatives.

You have the power. You just have to pick up a phone, and ask your friends, relatives, neighbors, to do the same. (They will, because it affects all of them.) Tell your reps to remove the legislation or you're voting them out. They don't want to lose their jobs. They will change if you tell them to. But only if you tell them. That is your power. Use it or lose it.

> the way to stop it is to talk to your representatives.

I keep seeing this advice, yet whenever it actually matters, it doesn't really work

No amount of talking to representatives stopped the genocide in Gaza, no amount of talking to representatives is stopping what the US is doing now in Iran

Majority of Congress voted to continue war in Iran, despite an overwhelming majority of Americans being opposed to it

I hate to be negative here but every single time I have spoken with a representative, they will just take the party line. "Thank you for reaching out. We are doing X as advised by the department of Y based on our evidence of Z."

Then they just continue with that was already happening.

Unfortunately representatives are bought out by their donors. Nothing you say will change their minds. What will change their minds is if their donors start losing money. (i.e. Having no employees to make their product/service)

> The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification.

You have consumer activist brain. Next you're going to suggest that we complain to the manager or start our own government and compete in the marketplace.

> The only thing that talks is money

No, the only thing that is talking is money. Money wants this. You're busy pretending like you're going to do a boycott; they're going to boycott you.

Complain about the internet? They'll just blacklist you from it. Complain about the phone? Well now you can't use one; try smoke signals. Complain about the landlord? They'll settle the case, kick you out on the street, and blacklist you among all private equity landlords and the management companies that service small landlords. You'll just go to a small landlord that doesn't use one of the management companies? Well they won't have access to a bunch of vendors that have exclusive contracts with and share ownership with the management companies; now they can't make any money and have to sell to private equity.

You've been fooled into thinking that being victimized is a moral failure of the victim. The perpetrators taught you that. They taught you that the only appropriate action is to beg and threaten to leave, and they shut down customer service and monopolized the market. But, again, the worst thing they trained you to do is to blame the victim.

>You're busy pretending like you're going to do a boycott; they're going to boycott you.

What do you mean? They still need people purchasing software and hardware.

You can argue effectiveness, but if enough people say no, then a boycott is extremely effective. The issue is always on awareness and making people take hard actions.

Short of a general strike, this sort of thing is going to move forward.

They don’t need you to purchase hardware or software any more. We’re moving to centralized economic planning, where resources for datacenter buildouts are reserved for people with sufficient political loyalty (and come from tax dollars), and the only products are surveillance and collective punishment.

If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll need to help build an alternative.

>Short of a general strike, this sort of thing is going to move forward.

Yes, I agree.

>They don’t need you to purchase hardware or software any more.

Need? No. But they still want as much money as possible. That's why a boycott/strike will still be effective. They don't need money anymore but will still bend over backwards for it.

>If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll need to help build an alternative.

I want to help. Not sure what I can do to help, though. Seems like simply calling my reps is talking to the wind.

>You've been fooled into thinking that being victimized is a moral failure of the victim.

And you seem to have been fooled into thinking all victims are powerless.

Give your interlocutor an explicit alternative to consumer activism!

Just because you're a pessimist doesn't mean you have to be coy. :)

Protesting, voting, and civil disobedience.

At the end of the day, this stuff is headed by humans. Humans are fragile, weak even. They like silly things like food and safety.

Look, I'm not saying we need to be killing people. However, I AM saying that just about every single significant rights progression in human history was achieved that way. So, draw whatever conclusions you want.

Ideally, we are above that. Christ, it's not the 20th century anymore. So hold up a sign or something.

> Protesting, voting, and civil disobedience.

Protesting, voting, and civil disobedience are all great, I agree.

Guy with the root of "pessimism" in his moniker: start writing about that in your posts!

Not working is the opposite of consumerism. Lol. Business's have one objective and that's to make a profit. You can't make a profit if you have no employees. With no employment, citizens won't have money to buy their products. So even if they have a huge inventory, it's useless. When their money stops flowing, that will make changes. And it will be swift.

>The only way to stop this from happening is half the >country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age >verification.

Or, refuse to participate or use any tech that implements OS age verification (start with communication app Discord).

Women posted their government IDs, including military IDs, in a stupid Tea/Gossip app. You or I refusing to participate means shit compared to the other 90% of the population.

Snowden's story makes zero sense. Former CIA employee turned NSA contractor, making six figures, working remotely in Hawaii, one day suddenly decides he has a conscience, somehow gets laptops filled with classified documents, hands them over in the South Pacific to Der Spegiel and Glenn Greenwald, then goes off to Russia where he's lived unmolested for years, and his smokin hot girlfriend joins him and he's never faced consequences where as Julian Assange was held captive in an embassy for years. Meanwhile, every other whistle blower that went to The Intercept was subsequently arrested and Greenwald still denies it was a honey pot, going as far as to throw Whitney Webb under the bus over it.

The reason nothing happened was because Snowden is still a State Dept or CIA asset. He's an actor and/or a limited hangout of some kind to show the US government and claim to be doing absolutely insane bullshit and nobody cares. New Zealand retroactively changed their laws (clearing John Key of any wrong doing for illegally spying on Kim Dotcom), allowing the GCHQ to legally spy on all their citizens.

As far as refusing to work for these companies, I was on Linux at work for over a decade. But after my last job I was forced to take a .NET role and with a $30k/yr paycut. It'd like to get back into a good role again where I can use Linux, but I'm not sure if I'd be willing to stand my ground on this issue, because I also don't want to lose my house and software jobs are incredibly scares right now. Unlike Snowden, I don't have a government paycheck coming in to continue spreading lies.

yes and the earth is flat too along with the moon landing of course classic

I put down real arguments for my statements which I think are reasonable to argue. You appeal to the status quo.

I think the earth is round. I'm a "globe-head," but I have MAD respect for people who hold such a controversial viewpoint. I think they're wrong, but I've read a lot of their stuff and don't think they're stupid.

I'm 50/50 on the moon landing. You would probably be too if you actually looked into it.

The scientifically learned use to thing leaches and bloodletting was innovative. Many of the things we think of as being scientifically enlightened today will be looked upon with horror 200 years from now.

We landed on the Moon. Frame-by-frame analysis of the dust coming off the Lunar Rover at the speed and trajectory shown on video from the Moon proves the Rover was in 1/6th the gravity of Earth [1]. There was no way for that 1/6th gravity to be faked on Earth in 1971. Incidentally, probes recently sent to the Moon show where the Lunar Rover made paths in the dusty surface of the Moon, and those paths align with the original video from the early 1970s.

Flat Earth only has a handful of anecdotal short-range observations of some flat areas of Earth taken from a perspective near ground level. Relative to the size of the Earth, those short-distance observations are dominated by the margins of error in the observation. All of those sight lines are accounted for in LIDAR scans of the Earth as well as the WGS84 model.

For less than $1,000 you can send a high-altitude balloon up to see the slight curvature of the Earth. For a few thousand dollars, you can circumnavigate the Earth in an airplane along a common latitude. For tens of thousands of dollars you can go to Antarctica and see the 24-hour Sun from November to January. Or you could just have all your friends from around the globe point to the Sun and measure that angle. With basic trigonometry, you can see the Sun is about 92 million miles away.

[1] Hsu & Horányi (2012), University of Colorado Boulder - "Ballistic motion of dust particles in the Lunar Roving Vehicle dust trails," American Journal of Physics: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012AmJPh..80..452H/abstra...

> The president and half the country called him a traitor.

Turns out they were right

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